January 26, 2012
Here at Hamilton College, students are only occasionally asked to consider their food choices. This Saturday, students were challenged to think about how their food choices impact their health and the environment by a live broadcast of the TEDx Manhattan lecture series Changing the Way We Eat, shown in Kirner Johnson’s Bradford Auditorium. The program took place in three parts: Issues, Impact and Innovation.
In his talk, Jamie Oliver, host of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, enumerated some of the issues central to his work combating obesity in public schools. For example, each carton of flavored milk served to children in public schools has four teaspoons of sugar added to it. As a result, over the course of a five-year elementary education, children consume an extra wheelbarrow load of sugar that they would not have consumed if they had only drunk natural milk.
Not only is the food we consume unhealthy, but the methods used to produce food in this country are irreparably harming the environment, as well as our capacity to produce food in the future. Fred Kirschenmann, for example, notes that our farming practices are destroying our soil.
He explained that soil is more than dirt it is an ecosystem that contains at least fifty million microorganisms in every teaspoonful. Modern agribusiness, in conjunction with climate change, have rendered 25 percent of the world’s remaining soil unfit for farming; we are losing soil at unsustainable rates even as the world’s population continues to grow.
Fortunately, every presenter noted that there is hope for America. For example, Oliver believes that education is central to improving Americans’ health and that children should not graduate from secondary school without knowing how to cook ten healthy meals. Supermarkets should offer advice on healthy eating. Finally he believes that changing consumption practices must start in America because “If America does it…other people will follow.”
Kirschenmann similarly believes that there are alternatives to our current methods of food production and delivery that will not damage the soil. Simple crop rotation to increase the concentration of fixed nitrogen in soil goes a long way toward maintaining soil quality.
Dr. Mitchell Davis, however, offers a different solution to America’s food and obesity crisis. He says that taste is a cultural construct. Because of this, there is nowhere in America where people of different socioeconomic classes eat the same fare.
This is not the case in other parts of the world, such as rural Italy. By addressing this difference, America will move toward developing a sustainable and viable food culture.
This is crucial because, as Mitchell explained, the best foods—those that are dense in nutrients—do more than fulfill our nutritional requirements: they “nourish our souls.”